psybre: Earth Abides, a classic post-apocalyptic novel published in 1949, is a bit less dark, and as an ecological fable, contains more science than The Road. When pondering to read The Road again, read this book instead.

I could not put this down, such was the compelling characterisation of the father and son and their need to survive in this post-apocalyse. Haunting and somehow uplifting, that despite the worst that could happen, the father brought up the son to believe in, and accept a chance to return to, humanity (the good guys). ( )

Its taken me 2 years to write this review. I am not going to say much. Its a book that will eviscerate you. I read it in one sitting. Okay, I put the book down because I felt I could not read another word through my tears, but 20 minutes later I absolutely had to keep reading. It left me wrung out. I hugged my child. I have made it a point to tell him everyday how much I love him. Writing these worlds has brought back the intensity of this story and I might start crying again. I plan on re-reading this at some point in time. ( )

Its taken me 2 years to write this review. I am not going to say much. Its a book that will eviscerate you. I read it in one sitting. Okay, I put the book down because I felt I could not read another word through my tears, but 20 minutes later I absolutely had to keep reading. It left me wrung out. I hugged my child. I have made it a point to tell him everyday how much I love him. Writing these worlds has brought back the intensity of this story and I might start crying again. I plan on re-reading this at some point in time. ( )

They weren't joking when they said this book was bloody bleak and depressing. A perfect book for the crap January days.

I liked this book but it didn't blow me away. The writing style was just not for me. I know the choppy bare bones writing is meant to convey the barren landscape and illustrate the breakdown of society so a lot of the conventional punctuation like apostrophes and speech marks are absent. It's just not my thing, I think the story could have been better told in the traditional novel writing style.

I was dying to learn about what happened to the world but this never got explained. That maddened me. It had a lot of shock horror moments in it but on the whole it didn't live up to the hype for me. ( )

Well that was probably the most depressing and horrific thing I have read. It is so bleak and unrelenting. The ending lets up _just_ enough, and no more. I'm not sure I could recommend it to anyone, really. Well, except for the fact it was incredible. It has that going for it. ( )

Like Steinbeck, McCarthy shepherds his protagonists from an apocalypse of man's making into a hell where man himself is the scourge. Like Steinbeck, McCarthy never holds more than a fistful of scavenged victuals between his heroes and death. And like Steinbeck, McCarthy conjures from this pitiless flight the miracle of unswerving humanity. Astonishingly, this is a book about grace.

With only the corpse of a natural world to grapple with, McCarthy's father and son exist in a realm rarely seen in the ur-masculine literary tradition: the domestic. And from this unlikely vantage McCarthy makes a big, shockingly successful grab at the universal.

“The Road” is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy’s signature, but this time in restrained doses — short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long, which is yet another departure for him.

But even with its flaws, there's just no getting around it: The Road is a frightening, profound tale that drags us into places we don't want to go, forces us to think about questions we don't want to ask. Readers who sneer at McCarthy's mythic and biblical grandiosity will cringe at the ambition of The Road . At first I kept trying to scoff at it, too, but I was just whistling past the graveyard. Ultimately, my cynicism was overwhelmed by the visceral power of McCarthy's prose and the simple beauty of this hero's love for his son.

It is a survival guide on how to design shoes out of tarp, replace a shopping-cart wheel, and siphon gas from a stove. McCarthy’s project is to render these objects strange—as remnants of an alien race—until they gain the power to instill awe and terror, a reenchantment of the world. A well-preserved sextant unexpectedly stirs the father, cans of peaches are handled like sacred chalices, and unknown tracks in the asphalt reduce the boy to tears.

As usual with McCarthy's writing, most of the normal apparatus of English prose is missing: no quotation marks, few capitals, few apostrophes and fewer commas. Sentences are mostly fragmentary, and dialogue is minimal. Typically, McCarthy salts his language with unusual or coined words: "claggy," "disclets," "nitty," "meconium," "rachitic," "salitter," "crozzled," "bolus," "woad," "parsible." Even a Yiddish word, "tokus."

Through his scaled-down view of a post-apocalypse American east, McCarthy has discovered a rich, engrossing landscape that is distinctly his own. It’s a horrible pleasure to watch the father and his son make their way through it, even as one remains unsure whether it would be more humane to hope for their survival or hope for their gentle death.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

Quotations

He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation (149).

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.

You forget some things, don't you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.

He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.

Wikipedia in English (2)

The Road follows a man and a boy, father and son, journeying together for many months across a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape, some years – the period of time almost the same as the age of the boy – after a great, unexplained cataclysm.

Haiku summary

His world burned away,A man walks seaward;Tries to save the son.(miken32)

In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.